[rawgabbit]

For me the danger of AI is that it enables the surveillance state through facial recognition and the instantaneous aggregation of all my data. For "national security" reasons, I may be detained and denied of my rights if Palantir hallucinates. Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?

[asdff]

The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.

[lmm]

> The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.

Not to the same extent. An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them. When the officers are algorithms that limitation is a lot weaker.

[asdff]

> An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them.

Whatever that limit might be is genuinely terrifying, given how far obedient soldiers have gone and not hit such a limit many times over the past.

[pydry]

It's more that in the past widespread surveillance required a lot of people, many of whom will have a conscience which will end up disrupting your surveillance.

The movie Das Lieben der Anderen makes this point very cogently.

Nowadays you can run a huge surveillance program with far fewer people, all of whom can be conscience free.

Im not sure how the next stasi will crumble but it'll be a lot harder to wrest them from power with the tools they have at their fingertips.

[bluefirebrand]

This is all true, but surely you can see how automating the authoritarian bent of the government still makes things worse than before?

[flextheruler]

You're confusing autocratic with authoritarian. Total war reached its most recent zenith in the 20th century. If governments have always been able to control people to the same degree, why was not until Napoleon that we saw the beginnings of nationalism? I say this rhetorically, as it is quite obvious that it was technology and industrialization. When we look at ancient Empires and see their territory on a map it would be much more accurate to only highlight population centers not the entirety of the land. Illiterate farmers, who made up the majority of the world, resided in small towns and villages and their daily lives were largely unaffected by conquerors.

[asdff]

There was nationalism pre napoleon. Arguably east asia is a better example than european history IMO. I would say there is strong sense of nationalism among han chinese both now and in history. Likewise for Japan and Korea. Pre islam Persia as well. I guess the source of this was consistent centralized authority over a large region vs any technological change. You had that in east asia. You didn't have that in europe after roman times. Even larger empires like kingdom of spain were not really seen as "spain" as we know it but a unified monarchy over the kingdoms of castile, leon, aragon, sicily, and napoli. Interestingly you didn't really have that in india either, no one controlled the continent until mughal times and by then the religious and cultural regional differences were pretty set in stone.

[flextheruler]

India is a great example of how relatively recent technology was required to finally unite and control a people. One can also just observe urbanization, capitalism, communication mediums(media). While China is unique for its cycles of unity and then disunity. These kingdoms were also dynastic and worshipped the emperor as a god. Such ways of government are a justification for ruling which supersedes the need of a national identity.

[thaumasiotes]

> The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence.

There are a couple of problems with this:

1. As a matter of raw empirical fact, a government around the year 40 wasn't too likely to possess a monopoly on violence.

2. A monopoly on violence isn't necessary to ruin your life. A simple nonexclusive license, which governments of the period did have, is sufficient.

[themafia]

> It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840

Yea, and they were way more successful at it in 1940 than 1840. Are you accounting for all the times they tried to enforce their authority but ultimately failed?

> And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence.

No one has a monopoly on violence. What they really have is called "qualified immunity."

In this particular instance, though, their violence is particularly enabled by cheap technology and computing power.

[j16sdiz]

"qualified immunity" is a legal concept on how government protect/"qualify" their employees from being sued.

"Monopoly on violence" is a political philosophy concept. What make a state a state.

[mememememememo]

Ot worse because it didn't hallucinate, and they are coming for you, as a free thinking "radical". They can tell from a long deleted blog post you made in 2005 about green energy.

[asdff]

Why bother with all that though? Just ask them to do their job for the party. If they don't, or you suspect they don't align with the party, you just execute them. Don't need tech for this. The tech is just for some people to get rich, not to really enable any new evil that can't already be achieved today with pen and paper and bullet (as modeled extensively in the last century).

Put it this way, if Hitler had grok, would it really get any worse for the Jews? I don't think so. I think they would be screwed no matter what.

[atq2119]

> if Hitler had grok, would it really get any worse for the Jew

Not grok specifically, but yes.

The holocaust in the Netherlands was remarkably bad in large part because the Dutch administration was so well-organized and had kept a registry of Jews.

Bad guys are going to use this technology to evil ends if given the chance.

BTW, there's a chilling alternate history novel called NSA by German author Andreas Eschbach about precisely that kind of idea. The premise is that computer science progressed a lot more quickly. The book opens with German data scientists in the 1930s combining census and financial transaction data (i.e., food purchases using electronic cash) to identify households that are hiding Jews and other "undesirables" .

[mememememememo]

Because you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed. But you can spy on people under "national security" while keeping them feeling happy enough. And that arrangement can last 1000 years.

[asdff]

Still not convinced that AI is offering anything new here. Especially when the statistics you'd reach for are often like 100 years old or more. Bayes theorem is older than the united states. I think among lay people there is a lot of conflation between AI and statistics, and also a lack of understanding of the state of that field and how mature it is. Nazi Germany of course heavily used statistical modeling and even contracted with IBM to quantify Jewish populations.

[pixl97]

This your point of view is kind of silly when you think about it. They used the modeling going after jews, but going after the people that were German but hid jews was much more difficult. With moden AI/statistical modeling they'd take all those people too.

[bluGill]

Most of Nazi Germany is after the fact revision. They were popular around the world in the 1930s - for their plan to deal with the Jews. It is only after they went to war that we decided they were bad for that plan as well. (some people were opposed to the plan all along, but there were plenty who were in favor of it)

[gzread]

Even the Allies hated the Jews. They just had a different plan to get rid of them. Instead of gassing them, the Allies expelled them to Palestine, so they'd be someone else's problem

[dragonwriter]

> Because you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed.

It failed because Nazi Germany was not militarily superior to combination of the nations that it got upset with it externally, not because of any internal failure of control. While its nice to think that Nazi Germany “failing” somehow disproves the viability of the same broad kind of one-party, massacre-the-opposition totalitarianism, it isn't really justified.

[gzread]

Germany, the USA and Israel are doing the Nazi Germany thing these days, with strong public support.

[jazz9k]

Another danger I see is job loss. Who wants a world where the wealthy control AI and completely destroy the middle class.

[yunnpp]

The wealthy.

[0x3f]

Human law enforcement hallucinates all the time. This is a bit like a poor argument against self driving.

[achierius]

The last line of GP's comment is key here: "Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?"

This shouldn't make as much of a difference as it does, but due to how our legal system works, it's much harder to get meaningful legal satisfaction when an algorithm (or other inhuman distributed system) commits a crime against a person than when a person does so.

[0x3f]

I think you're confused about the mechanism involved. It's hard to get satisfaction due to e.g. qualified immunity. The fact they use technology is largely irrelevant. You couldn't sue the NSA for spying on you before AI either.

[pixl97]

"Computer says no", look it up.

Cars measure success by not hitting things.

Cops measure success by number of people they arrest. Note, not the number of people found guilty, that's the prosecutor.

Cops will gladly use a hallucinating computer system to beat the absolute fuck out of you with qualified immunity.

[0x3f]

> Cops measure success by number of people they arrest.

Simply not true. Police KPIs tend to focus on crime rates.

Regardless, they can mistreat you with or without AI backing.

[pixl97]

The elected officials like chiefs get judged on crime rates. Individual officers are on arrests and tickets (regardless of rules against quotas)

[0x3f]

If we assume they are on quotas then what difference does technology make? They had quotas before the technology, qualified immunity too. 100 false arrests with no recourse are 100 false arrests with no recourse.

If anything I would expect technology favors the victim of false arrest because it gives the cop a face-saving get out. Previously, a cop who false-arrested you would have been incentivized to take it all the way, because you getting justice for it is intrinsically tied to impugning their word and/or reputation.